Ambiance Vs Nautilus

Sporting big buttons, a lighter toolbar (said to only be used in Nautilus), and making use of GNOME’s new ‘symbolic’ icons, the update makes for a drastic improvement to the “look” (and I use that term loosely) alpha testers have had to endure thus far.

Elsewhere

Interestingly the rest of the theme refresh – which you should note is not finished – sports many elements previously seen in Ubuntu Design Team mock-ups. Thus we see softer gradients, coloured checkboxes, and rounder corners on widgets introduced.

Although I am hoping that the ‘fading tab’ look (below) is a development quirk rather than a design decision, the rest of the changes get thumbs up from me.

The development branch also sees the return of ‘dark menus’ for the desktop item:

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Want to play with it? You’ll need to be running Ubuntu 12.10 and have the latest updates (specifically the latest versions of the Unico theme engine and light-themes) installed.

As with all coverage of Ubuntu development, the images you see present are not final or indicative, and may contain snapshots of bugs.